Hey guys, it's me again and it's time to play another round of "Semitish vs
Asianic".
Now as if John's Asianic isn't suffering logical problems enough, I checked
out the word that he mentioned in Chechen: stu "bull". It was claimed that
this was somehow evidence of a borrowing from Caucasic into Semitic at a
very early date - It would have to be at around 6000 BCE or earlier.
I looked at the following link to Starostin's nifty database-interacting cgi
program...
http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?flags=engnnnn&single=1&basename=\data\cauc\nakhet&text_number=++67&root=config
It would seem that he lists the following as cognates in ProtoNakh, a branch
of NorthEast Caucasian:
Chechen stu
Ingush ust
Batsbi pst.u
He understandably reconstructs ProtoNakh *pst.u which, unfortunately for
John, doesn't look quite like "bull" as we find it in Semitic with an
initial "th"-sound.
Here's a thought. Since Proto-Nakh was spoken AFTER Semitic ever was and
since despite Starostin's attempts to link it to other words outside the
branch that refer to "man" or "male", why don't we suggest the more obvious
- The word was borrowed via another language at a late date (an IndoEuropean
language?)
Even if we agree with Starostin that the word is ancient, it would
apparently have not meant "bull" and certainly, the phonetics of the word
would be incongruent to Semitic's *Tauru because Nakh *st.- seems
convincingly, although admittedly strangely, to come from *s before *i or
*y. Starostin would reconstruct North Caucasian *c'wijo "male".
BTW, I don't believe in "North Caucasian" the way Starostin does so I would
prefer just to say that the word is borrowed late into Nakh and leave it at
that.
- gLeN
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